1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of data processing systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for coordinating, integrating, and routing various types of customer information in a network environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's competitive business environment has increased the importance of customer service. In many industries, the “best” company is determined by the service it provides its customers. In many cases, the customer's primary interface with the company is the telephone. Depending on the particular business, incoming customer calls are typically serviced by some type of automated call center, configured to perform both outbound calling and inbound calling operations.
For many years call centers operated with separate telephony and computer systems to process customer information. Call center employees would answer the telephone and, based on information provided by the caller, would access an application on a host computer (e.g., a customer database). With recent advances in computer-telephony integration, however, information about an incoming call may now be automatically provided by the Central Office to the company's private branch exchanges (hereinafter “PBX”). This information can be used to automatically access host applications (e.g., customer database records) to obtain customer profiles.
One such system is known as an automatic number identification (hereinafter “ANI”) system. ANI systems are designed to detect special signals associated with inbound calls which identify the phone number of the calling party. Since the signal can uniquely identify the calling party, the call can then be routed to a specific agent or interactive voice response (hereinafter “IVR”) application uniquely tailored to the needs of the particular caller.
In addition, new communication channels have developed in recent years (due in part to the explosive growth of the Internet), providing a variety of ways for customers to communicate with call centers. For example, modern call centers are expected to support customer inquiries via voicemail, email, fax, voice over IP, web chat & collaborative browser media, in addition to the traditional voice over PSTN service.
One problem which confronts modern call centers is how to organize and route the vast amount of information transmitted through each of these communication channels. Many prior art systems have taken a somewhat piecemeal approach, treating each of these communication channels as separate and distinct. Although some progress has been made in developing integrated computer-telephony call systems (see, e.g., Hammond, U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,487), a fully comprehensive customer tracking system which operates seamlessly across a variety of communication media types has yet to be developed.